Of course she did.
Shane Gillis seems to have a knack for triggering people any time he’s on SNL, and his appearance as guest host this past weekend is no different.
Gillis is one of the most popular comedians in the world right now, not just for his standup but also his Netflix show Tires and his podcast Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast alongside fellow comedian Matt McCusker.
Back in 2019, he was actually fired from Saturday Night Live just a week after being announced as a cast member over resurfaced comments from his podcast, though that turned out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to him, because Shane has blown up since then while SNL has remained painfully unfunny.
In 2024 the show finally decided to welcome him back as host for the first time since the controversy, and as you can imagine, there were a lot of people in the show’s regular audience who weren’t happy about it.
Of course these are people who probably weren’t familiar with Shane’s standup beforehand, but his first appearance was so successful that the show invited him back again last year for the first show after SNL celebrated their 50th anniversary, and then had him on as guest host once again this weekend for the third time since they fired him, making him the most frequent guest host over the past three years.
Well this time around it was his monologue that had SNL viewers once again clutching their pearls, taking to Twitter to complain, and writing think pieces about how harmful his jokes are to society. (No, that’s not an exaggeration).
During the 6 minute monologue, Shane poked fun at his own weight by joking that he “looks like a lesbian” and saying that women dress like “whores” at the gym these days:
“I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now? Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe… have you seen it? I’ve seen it. The shorts. Have you seen the shorts? Those neon, they’re like artificial bait colored and the wrinkles go like around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole. And don’t look, you’re not allowed to look.
For real, don’t look, because they are filming. I’m in the background of like 10 TikToks right now.”
He also ended it by making fun of his hairline:
“I’ve balded directly into an Adolf Hitler haircut, and it’s not good, because I give a lot of speeches, and the front falls down a lot and there’s no way to adjust it without looking exactly like…
It’s the only way. I’m not going to do that, that’s gay. That’s it, you’re either gay or you’re Hitler. And isn’t that where we’re at as a country?”
Well one of those calling out Gillis is (former?) country singer Maren Morris (imagine that), who took to social media to post a video of herself in gym wear giving the camera the finger, set to her song “be a b*tch” and captioning it:
“leave my gym short wedgies out of it”
@marenmorris leave my gym short wedgies out of it
The line in the song she chose (“your hairline recedes you”) seems to be an intentional shot at the monologue too…although Gillis also poked fun at his hairline, so I’m not sure how upset he’s going to be about it.
Of course Maren is far from the only celebrity who was upset by the monologue: Dan Levy, son of actor Eugene Levy who starred in American Pie and featured a scene about livestreaming sex with a foreign exchange student and having relations with an apple pie, also thought the jokes went too far.
“Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists. There’s a difference there. By the way, I’ve seen more men’s nipples at the gym than I’ve ever seen women showing their bodies off. But I’m speechless that something like that can exist on live national television.
And to be perfectly honest, more men need to be standing up in opposition to it because it’s complacency that has created the environment in which women are sexually assaulted and it’s a ‘conversation’ as opposed to a ‘crime.’ This is not a women’s issue, this is an everybody issue.
Because the more that men objectify women in the media, the more that other men see them as objects and treat them as objects. They are not objects. They are superior human beings to men, okay? And I’m sorry if this gets me in trouble with the internet, but f***.”
Just another day for Shane Gillis and his long and rocky history on SNL. But something tells me he’ll still be back next year to guest host again.
